Expat wanderer

My favorite service of all, Evensong. Everything is just moving along, peacefully, penitentially, as we enter Holy Week, when all of a sudden, the choir is singing Gounod, the Jerusalem anthem from Gallia. Oh, WOW! Gounod makes me grin, and he moves me. Gounod . . . Gounod ROCKS!

And here you can here the anthem:

I was introduced to Gounod in Doha. Our priest, Ian Young, led a group called the Doha Singers, and he chose challenging music. We learned Gounod’s Mass for St. Cecelia, and the music is the kind that gets into your blood. I couldn’t get enough of it. I never get sick of it. Gounod is music with a sense of drama and a sense of humor about itself. I think it is his sense of timing, how you hold a note just a little longer than you would expect, and then rollick on to the next. I had never heard this piece before, but Gounod is so individual, so unique – it had to be Gounod.

It was a perfect evening, a lovely service, and the sun shone in through the cross as it set:

At the end, we sang one of my very favorite hymns, The Day Thou Gavest Lord, is Ended:

I admit it, I am pretty tough, but these words make me weak and weepy:

All in all, a lovely day. Our son joined us for the first episode of The Game of Thrones on HBO. He’s read all the books, I am on book 2, and AdventureMan is reading the first book, the one on which this series is based. Great way to begin our week. 🙂

This was in my newest New Yorker magazine, originally given me by Little Diamond, now I can’t live without my subscription. 🙂 There is the kind of news you get on television, like what they have pictures of, maybe not the most important stuff but visual. Then there is National Public Radio news, and the New York Times, and The New Yorker. The New Yorker also has some of the greatest, funniest covers ever, and great cartoons. This one, as you might imagine, is near and dear to my heart: